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Barone: Liberal, conservative parties not so hot

“More tears are shed over answered prayers,” the 16th century nun St. Teresa of Avila is supposed to have said, “than over unanswered ones.”

So it may be appropriate to shed a tear for two or three generations of American political scientists whose prayers have been answered -- in a way that most political scientists today regret.

The prayers of the political scientists in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s was that our party system would evolve into one with one clearly liberal party and one clearly conservative party.

This was a common enough argument at the time. The Gallup poll used to periodically ask voters if this was a good idea, and about half of them thought it was.

The political scientists had a point. In the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, American politics seemed horribly scrambled.

The Republican Party had its progressives and liberals who wanted to accept the New Deal. Indeed, in the 1930s some of the strongest advocates of big government programs were Republican Sens. Bronson Cutting and George Norris and New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (who was once elected to Congress on the Republican and Socialist tickets).

But there were also plenty of conservatives who detested the New Deal, like Sen. Robert Taft (“Mr. Republican”) and Col. Robert McCormick, proprietor of the Chicago Tribune, then the largest circulation broadsheet newspaper in the country.

The Democrats were, if anything, even more deeply split. White Southerners who remembered the Civil War wanted nothing to do with the party of Lincoln. They accepted New Deal farm programs that were carefully crafted to exclude blacks from benefits.

Many big-city machine Democrats were leery of unions and direct federal benefits. They wanted to hand out the goodies themselves.

And many Democrats, North and South, believed in Jeffersonian small government and opposed crony capitalism in the tradition of the party’s founder, Andrew Jackson.

All this left political scientists in a rage. How could voters make rational choices when the parties presented no coherent set of policies? Wouldn’t it be more democratic to have one liberal and one conservative party?

Most, although not all, political scientists in those days were liberal Democrats, and most of them had little doubt which ideological party would prevail most of the time. It would be a liberal Democratic Party, purged of its Jeffersonian conservatives (FDR tried this in the 1938 off-year elections) and with its Southern conservatives submitting to party discipline in the House and Senate.

The Republicans would be left with all the conservatives and thus be consigned to defeat most of the time.

Well, their prayers have been answered. Today, we have a solidly liberal Democratic Party and a solidly conservative Republican Party. The voters get to make a rational choice between two pretty clearly defined alternatives.

So now political scientists lament gridlock and polarization and partisanship and reminisce about those (mostly mythical) days when politicians of both parties got along.

St. Teresa had a point.

• Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.